This chapter explores representations of impairment and disability in the ‘Literary Realism’ writings of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau and investigates a different medium of popular perceptions and representations of disability, that of popular fiction. Criticism addressing the use of disabled characters in Victorian fiction frequently acknowledges how such characters function by invoking feelings of sympathy, both within the narrative and in readers. However, Deerbrook’s Maria Young and Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss reverse our expectations: rather than being the subjects of observation and sympathy, they operate as model observers of the world around them. In this, they differ from the stereotypical role assigned to disabled characters in other Victorian novels and seek to follow one of the guiding principles of Literary Realism, the accurate portrayal of daily life, rather than some romanticised notion.

Over the last ten years or so, a culture of war has returned to prominence in English- speaking societies, and war has broken out again as a favoured topic in the criticism of early modern English drama. This chapter recalls that the discourse of early modern (if not modern) warfare almost invariably turns on a religious axis at bottom, the rhetoric of crusade on the paradoxical premise that the exercise of power over life and death is human practice but divine prerogative. The Catholic 'tyrants' and Tamburlaine's hegemony that extends to the feminine sphere in and through Zenocrate, are discussed. The chapter proposes that perhaps the most culturally prominent instance of a combined metaphysical and military narrative, the biblical encounter between the Jewish heroine Judith and the Assyrian general Holofernes, hovers in the background of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays.

This chapter describes the events on polling day, and the statistics relating to voter turnout and to the number of yes votes. The results are examined and an assessment of how the people’s decision was finally implemented into law follows.

Sir Walter Ralegh mentions Mandeville twice: once in The Discoverie of Guiana and again in The History of the World. Like anthropologists later, he considers the 'fables' of The Travels as meaningful narratives that can be explained rationally, and it is no surprise that his reading of the Acephali was current until the nineteenth century. This chapter discusses an example of the Acephali that shows how by resorting to an early source Ralegh manages to distance himself from the iconographical and fabulous tradition. Ralegh's travel narrative is based on epistemological strategies that adumbrate in many ways the Baconian method, even if it is a far cry from the factual objectivity of the Royal Society experimentalists. Critics have often dismisses Ralegh as a mere dabbler in natural history and travel literature, but Ralegh is one of the finest readers and interpreters of his time, capable of mastering very distinct hermeneutic systems.

Medieval Jewish society saw itself as being under siege in a struggle for survival within a Christian population that abounded with threats and temptations, both economic and intellectual. In sources written by the Jews in the first generation following the attack on the Jewish communities in the year 1096, emphasis was laid on the Jewish woman's readiness to lead religious resistance to the death, together with her unswerving devotion to Jewish values. The change in the status of the woman manifested itself in at least three significant ways; in her economic-legal status, in her status within the family and in her social standing. Starting in the twelfth century, a woman stepping down from her bridal canopy was a woman of a new and different status. The women also succeeded in bypassing an almost impossible obstacle in regard to study and education.

The freedom of movement within the EU continues to be a hotly contested topic in British politics. This chapter argues that this debate is closely connected to the enlargement of the European Union – most notably the ‘Eastern enlargement’ in 2004. The author explores how the accession of ten new members was discussed by Conservative Party leaders in Parliament in the years preceding the Brexit referendum, asking if EU member states and their citizens were framed as part of a new ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson), or as culturally different outsiders. The analysis reveals that while the support for EU enlargement endured throughout the researched years, Tory party leaders, even when in opposition, exclusively emphasised the economic benefits of enlargement for Britain. This only changed in 2011 when UKIP had successfully put immigration on the agenda. Subsequently, a major shift occurred from highlighting benefits to the national interest to calls for stricter border control and active discouragement of migration.

This chapter explores the work of French philosopher Abdennour Bidar. Via his publications, scholarly articles and media interventions, Bidar attempts to sketch out the contours of what he calls a twenty-first century Muslim existentialism. Muslim existentialism emerges from what Bidar calls un islam sans soumission. Islam or Islamic belief without submission is premised on a profound desire for freedom of conscience, expression and dissent. Prior to his work on the notion of Islam without submission, Bidar also developed the term self Islam with reference to European citizens of Muslim heritage, the majority of whom choose to define their own diverse relationships to Islam on their own terms. Bidar’s approach can be described as a project of cultural translation, whereby he can be regarded as a cultural mediator who seeks to productively confront non-Western and Western concepts of religion, spirituality, modernity and humanism. His work, which places him at the intersections of the academic world, the media and the political arena, makes him a particularly interesting figure through which to investigate the circulation of narratives concerning French Muslims and their diverse relationships to secularism.

This chapter discusses The Aachen Memorandum (AM) (1995) by historian Andrew Roberts as a paradigmatic example of one important branch of Eurosceptic novels. It analyses the novel as a dystopian narrative that depicts the European Union as a dys-EUtopia, set in a future where Britain has become an undesirable and unpleasant place that shares salient features with the dystopian societies of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. The chapter argues that Robert’s influential novel takes an extremely Eurosceptic perspective, extrapolating the EU’s integration efforts and policies into a totalitarian means of control through constant surveillance, propaganda or the re-writing of history. The chapter illustrates how the Eurosceptic novel actively promotes national identity and sovereignty, drawing upon a storehouse of Eurosceptic tropes and repeating a certain nationalist version of British history that sets Britain against a EUropean Other. Expressing and disseminating widespread Eurosceptic fears, Roberts’s novel thus anticipates Brexit.

The decade preceding the EU referendum saw intensifying debate on the nature of Englishness, shaped by an anxiety about the loss of national and cultural identity. Links between nationalism and shared perceptions of history are well-documented, and recent years have seen a popular turn to imagined national pasts, one frequently visited period being the reign of Henry VIII. In order to explore the intersection of historical fiction and contemporary English identity, this chapter reads two novels with a Tudor setting, published in 2014 and 2015 by the best-selling author Philippa Gregory. The texts are found to be expressions of England’s ‘postcolonial melancholia’ (Gilroy, 2004). Ostensibly concerned with the ruptures of Henry’s reign, they are preoccupied with change and loss, lamenting the loss of privilege and portraying the emerging modernity as an invading force that threatens ancient birth-right. A picture of English grievance emerges which sheds some light on the visions of a prelapsarian England that help to shape the contemporary nation as it searches for a sovereignty it imagines itself to have lost.

Sarah Fine begins her response by calling Ayelet Shachar's lead essay "a Leviathan for the twenty-first century." We have become accustomed to a “traditional” picture of the modern state where sovereign authority is clearly delineated by borders lying at its territory’s edges, but as Shachar shows, this is an illusion. Just as Hobbes's Leviathan was a protean entity, capable of changing its form when required, so borders are transforming to suit the evolving legal and political landscape. Fine proceeds to outline Shachar's analysis of how borders function in practice. She then describes and assesses three possible responses to "living among monsters." The first of these is to admit defeat. The second—Shachar's preference—is to try to tame the monsters through legal methods: extending protections to follow the de-territorialized model, making available more safe, legal routes to places of protection. Fine observes that Shachar's preference for such methods derives from a “non-idealist” attitude to the shifting border that recognizes states’ sovereign authority to regulate movement. While agreeing that this response would be "much better than what we have now," Fine argues that it would leave many of the “dark corners” of migration control unlit. Her preference, the third response, is to fight back through grassroots political resistance. At the same time, she observes that the power of the shifting border is rooted in the belief that migration control is a fundamental sovereign right of states, and questions whether this belief is really justified.